I'm Your Man (20 page)

There was one more summer festival for Leonard to play—the Mariposa Folk Festival, at Innis Lake, near Toronto—before going back to New York to continue work on his album. There were two more sessions with Hammond in August and then another three-week break, during which Leonard flew to L.A. Director John Boorman was talking about making a movie based on the song “Suzanne” and having Leonard score it. No one had ever paid his way across the continent before. There were even matchboxes with his name on them waiting for him in his room at the Landmark Hotel. Lighting a cigarette, Leonard sat at the desk and wrote a song called “Nine Years Old,” which would become “The Story of Isaac.” Nothing came of the film. At various times Leonard has said that he “couldn't relate” to the idea or that it was dropped when it was discovered he did not own the rights to the song. The rights to “Suzanne,” “Master Song” and “Dress Rehearsal Rag,” he said, had been “pilfered in New York City.”
26
Leonard, assisted by his manager, had set up his own publishing company, Stranger Music. An arranger, producer and music publisher named Jeff Chase whom Mary Martin thought might prove helpful was brought in, and somewhere in the process Leonard appeared to have somehow signed over the songs to him.

Said Leonard, “My mother, who I always thought was kind of naive—she was Russian, her English was imperfect—said to me, ‘Leonard, you be careful of those people down there. They're not like us.' And of course, I didn't say anything to disrespect, she was my mother, but in my mind I thought, ‘Mother, you know, I'm not a child.' I was 32, I'd been around the block a few times. But she was right. She was right.”
*
27

On September 8, in Studio B, Leonard recorded four more songs with Hammond. It would prove to be their last session together. Several reasons have been posited for Hammond's dropping out. Leonard always said that Hammond became ill, and certainly he had health problems: when he signed Leonard to Columbia it was shortly after he had taken time off following a heart attack, and in subsequent years he would suffer several more. Another reason given was the illness of Hammond's wife. In his autobiography, Hammond said nothing about illness and implied that there were musical differences. Leonard, he wrote, “got the jitters” at Hammond's simple production approach and “could not conceive of his voice being commercial enough to sell records. Simplicity was his greatest asset and we told him so. It was not what he wanted to hear. . . . I was overruled and another producer brought in.”
28

Hammond's recollections about signing Leonard admittedly include several errors, but Larry Cohen, his associate at Columbia, backs up what Hammond said about his production style. “John's MO, having known him for years, was not to change people or their sound, other than what they normally were, and what he did was bring out the best in people doing what they did. He didn't give Dylan any directions—Dylan came in with the things that he wanted to do and that's why John signed him and he let him do what he did.”

Leonard himself said something once that suggested he wanted something more than just simple voice and guitar. “I was trying to find—I wanted a kind of ‘found sound' background to a lot of my tunes. What I wanted running through ‘The Stranger Song' was the sound of a tire on a wet pavement, a kind of harmonic hum. [Hammond] was almost ready to let me take a recording device into a car. He let me do the next best thing. I got in touch with mad scientists around New York who had devices that would create sounds. Unfortunately, he got sick in the middle of this operation.”
29
Whatever the explanation, after four arduous months of work on his debut album, nothing came of it. Leonard was back to square one.

Ten

The Dust of a Long Sleepless Night

S
o much had happened in the year since Leonard played Judy Collins his songs that the world itself seemed to be on speed. But some things had not happened—primarily, Leonard's album. It seemed to Leonard that this inability to make a record was a problem peculiar to him. Judy Collins had just finished her seventh LP,
Wildflowers,
which contained three more songs that Leonard had written but that he had not yet recorded himself. There was a second cover of “Suzanne” in the singles charts too, sung by Noel Harrison, an English actor, the same age as Leonard. It must have felt to Leonard that he had lost the rights to his song in more ways than one, and since “Suzanne” was by consensus his signature song, that he was losing himself as well. When the recording sessions stopped, Leonard behaved like a lost man. For a week he stayed shut in his hotel room, smoking a great deal of hashish. He had felt lost in New York once before, when he was attending Columbia University, and on that occasion he had left after a year and gone back home to Montreal and his friends. But with Columbia Records there was unfinished business, and so he stayed, turning to the nearest thing he had in New York to an artists' community: the Warhol set and the denizens of the Chelsea Hotel.

Occasionally the two would overlap. Edie Sedgwick, a gamine blond beauty and the most famous of Warhol's socialite starlets, had moved into the Chelsea, having accidentally burned down the apartment her mother bought for her. Edie had crawled along the floor and escaped with only a burned hand. Her new home at the Chelsea was on the fourth floor, down the hall from Leonard's room. Her friend Danny Fields, who was visiting Leonard, inquired if he had ever met Edie. Leonard said he had not. “Would you like to?” Fields asked. “She's a magical person that everyone falls in love with.” Leonard said he would. Fields ran off to Edie's room. He found her there with Brigid Berlin, another of Warhol's renegade socialites. Plump and homely, Brigid might not have been blessed with looks but undeniably had personality—when Fields first set eyes on her, Brigid was climbing out of a yellow cab wearing nothing but a sarong around her waist, with a toy doctor's kit dangling between her naked breasts, and carrying the big fake doctor's bag that she took with her everywhere. It was filled with vials of “something she'd concocted like a mad scientist,” its ingredients mostly liquid amphetamine and vitamin B. “She'd run around with a syringe, screaming, ‘I'm going to get you!' and she did, injecting you in the butt right through your pants.” It earned her the name Brigid Polk, as in “poke.” Warhol gave her a starring role in
The Chelsea Girls,
alongside Edie and Nico.

When Fields walked into the room, he found the two women “pasting sequins one at a time in a coloring book,” an activity pursued after the age of seven only if a person is on speed. “Brigid had fallen asleep on a tube of Ready Glue and she was stuck to the floor; she tried to turn around and gave up and was just lying there. There was the remnants of a fire in the fireplace and there were candles in candlesticks that she'd bought at the voodoo store where everybody went to get spells and unguents,” Leonard included. “I said, ‘Edie, Leonard Cohen the famous poet and songwriter is here and he'd like to meet you.' She said, ‘Oh, bring him over, I'll just get made up.' When Edie put on makeup it could take three hours, literally. So I said, ‘He's a simple guy, and anyway you look beautiful, I'm going to go get him.' ”

Fields returned with Leonard. On entering the room, Leonard's eyes were immediately drawn to Edie's candles. He headed straight for them and stood there, staring. “The first thing Leonard said to her was, ‘I'm wondering about these candles. Did you put them here in this order?' ‘Order? Please! It's just candles.' And he said, ‘No, it's a very unfortunate order that you've placed them in. It means bad luck or misfortune.' Edie giggled, and that was it, I left them alone with these candles. But wait. They caught fire soon afterward and the room was burned completely black. Edie got out a second time by crawling across the floor, and when she reached for the door handle, once again she burned her hand.”

Brigid Polk was an artist. Among her best-known works was her series of “tit paintings,” made by dipping her breasts in paint and pressing them onto paper. She also had a “Cock Book,” a blank-paged book in which she asked people (women as well as men) to do a drawing of their penis. Among the participants were the painter Jean-Michel Basquiat, the actress Jane Fonda, and Leonard. Leonard, declining to illustrate his privates, wrote on a page, “Let me be the shy one in your book.” He was involved and yet not involved—which described his general dealings with the Warhol set. They were more to his taste than the hippie scene on the West Coast that had begun to infiltrate New York: “There seemed to be something flabby about the hippie movement. They pulled flowers out of public gardens. They put them in guns, but they also left their campsites in a mess. No self-discipline,” he said.
1
In addition, Warhol's Pop Art was an interesting study for Leonard as he made the shift from literature to pop music, from ivory tower to commercial art, and the models and starlets who surrounded Warhol were an interesting diversion and occasional indulgence. He was accidentally captured on film in the company of Warhol starlet Ivy Nicholson in
B.O.N.Y. (Boys of New York),
made by a Texas film buff named Gregory Barrios, under Warhol's patronage. But in truth, Leonard was just passing through.
*

He missed Marianne and Hydra. He took to eating alone in a Greek restaurant, drinking retsina, ordering from the menu in Greek, playing Greek records on the jukebox. He sent Marianne a long, tender poem he had written to her. It began,

    
This is for you

    
it is the book I meant to read to you

    
when we were old

    
Now I am a shadow

    
I am as restless as an empire

    
You are the woman

    
who released me.

It ended,

    
I long for the boundaries

    
of my wandering

    
and I move

    
with the energy of your prayer

    
for you are kneeling

    
like a bouquet

    
in a cave of bone

    
behind my forehead

    
and I move towards a love

    
you have dreamed for me.
2

At Leonard's bidding, Marianne flew over to New York with little Axel. Leonard set about introducing Marianne to his life in the city, taking her, she says, to all the “funny little coffeehouses he loved.” She would go and shop at the Puerto Rican magic store that Leonard and Edie frequented, buying candles and perfumed oils that made beautiful patterns on the water in Leonard's rust-stained hotel bathtub. They lunched at El Quijote, where Leonard introduced her to Buffy Sainte-Marie, whom Marianne liked. He also introduced her to Andy Warhol and to his fellow hotel residents, many of whom she found bizarre. It was “a strange scene,” said Marianne. She couldn't help but contrast the dark, detached hedonism of his life in New York with their life on Hydra, when they were “barefoot, poor and in love.” But it also became evident that Leonard really did not want her to live with him. While Leonard stayed on at the Chelsea, Marianne moved with Axel, who was now nine years old, into an apartment on Clinton Street, which she shared with Carol Zemel—the wife of Leonard's friend Henry Zemel—who was studying at Columbia.

During the daytime, while Axel was at school and Carol Zemel was at the university, Marianne would make little handicrafts, kittens made out of wool and steel. At night, while Carol kept an eye on the child, she sold them on the street outside clubs. It was not the best of neighborhoods, and Leonard asked her to stop, telling her that he worried about her, but she continued. The only time she encountered any trouble was when she was robbed of her earnings at knifepoint after leaving a cinema where she had gone alone to watch a Warhol film. Leonard and Marianne still saw each other; he took her to a Janis Joplin concert and introduced her to Joplin backstage. But the time he spent with Marianne grew less and less. She knew he was seeing other women. Things brightened for Marianne when Steve Sanfield, their friend from Hydra, showed up in New York on a mission to raise funds for Roshi's new Zen center, giving her someone else to talk to and see. She tried her best to make it work, staying for a year, but ultimately she was not happy in New York. When the school year was over, she went back to Europe.

Leonard packed his bags and moved out of the Chelsea, and back into the Henry Hudson Hotel, the dive on West Fifty-seventh Street. “It was a forbidding place, a hole and a holdout,” says Danny Fields. “I thought maybe the Chelsea got a little too happy for him and he needed someplace more suitably grim and desolate.”

Four weeks after Leonard's album had been put on hold, it was once again back on. Columbia had appointed a new producer. John Simon was twenty-six years old, “just another junior producer among many at Columbia Records—that is, until I made a lot of money for them with ‘Red Rubber Ball.' ” The song, cowritten by Paul Simon (no relation) and recorded by the Cyrkle, whom John Simon produced, was such a big hit that even Leonard was aware of it. (“I loved it,” said Leonard, “still do.”) As a result John Simon earned “an office with a window and some decent artists to produce,” first Simon & Garfunkel, then Leonard Cohen.

John Simon knew nothing about Leonard or the album's troubled history. “Leonard told me that he'd been living in the Chelsea Hotel waiting for John Hammond to schedule a session, and, just as a recording date was approaching, John called him to put off the date for a month. Leonard, as I remember it, asked for a different producer because he was tired of waiting. As far as I know, Hammond was not ill. I visited with John in his office and he had nothing but praise for Leonard.”

Simon started reading Leonard's poetry and, in order to get better acquainted, invited him to stay with him at his parents' empty house in Connecticut, where they could discuss the album in peace. “I think Leonard saw a familiar milieu in that house; both our families were middle-class, intellectual Jews. I went to bed and when I woke up in the morning, I found Leonard poring through my father's books. He said he had stayed up all night.” Simon listened to the “acoustic, demo-y” recordings that Leonard had done with Hammond, and they set a date to start work, October 11, 1967. This time, when Leonard arrived at Studio B for the first session, there were no musicians waiting for him, just his young producer and the two union-mandated engineers. (“Producers could only talk,” says Simon. “Unless you were in the union, you were strictly forbidden from touching any equipment, mics, mixing board, etc.”)

Leonard “appeared confident,” says Simon, “and he was singing great—nice quality, great pitch.” There was no full-length mirror this time; Leonard simply sat, played and sang. There were eleven sessions with Simon over the space of two months in Studios B and E. Steve Sanfield was still in town, so Leonard invited him along. “He laid down all of his songs, one after the other, and I was blown away by them,” Sanfield remembers. “The producer seemed blown away too. He said, ‘We're going to make a great album.' ”

Sanfield was staying with a friend who lived in New York, Morton Breier, the author of
Masks, Mandalas and Meditation
. They had made plans to meet with a group of young Hasidic students—despite his deep involvement with Zen Buddhism, Sanfield had not lost interest in Judaism. Neither had Leonard, who accepted the invitation to go with them. On their way they happened upon a chanting circle—a group of Hare Krishnas, led by Swami Bhaktivedanta, who was on his first visit to the U.S. Allen Ginsberg was there, chanting with them. Leonard told Sanfield he wanted to stay and to go on without him. Sanfield, having found the meeting with the Hasidim unfulfilling, came back just as the chanting circle was breaking up. Leonard had not moved from where he had left him. “What do you think?” Sanfield asked him. Leonard answered, “Nice song.”

Leonard was similarly unresponsive when Sanfield talked to him about his own teacher, Roshi Sasaki, and the effect he had had on his life. But that night Leonard came to Breier's apartment to see Sanfield and told him, “I need to tell you a story.” Late into the night, says Sanfield, “he told me a long version of the tale of Sabbatai Sevi, the false Messiah. I said, ‘Why did you tell me that?' He said, ‘Well, I just thought you should hear it.' I think it was because I was talking in such superlative praise of my Roshi.” Leonard was suspicious of holy men. “They know how to do it,” he would explain three decades later, when he was living in Roshi's monastery. “They know how to get at people around them, that's what their gig is.” The reason he understood was, as he said, “because
I
was able to do it in my own small way. I was a very good hypnotist when I was very young.”
3

It was four in the morning when Leonard and Sanfield left to get breakfast, “and who should come walking down the street,” says Sanfield, “but Bhaktivedanta, in his robes.” When the guru came close, Leonard asked him, “How does that tune go again?” Bhaktivedanta stopped and sang them “Hare Krishna,” “and we picked it up, and continued walking down the streets, singing it ourselves.”

Leonard was still finding it a struggle in the recording studio, but by the fourth late-night session with Simon he had succeeded in doing three final takes: “You Know Who I Am,” “Winter Lady,” and, after nineteen failed attempts at recording it, “Suzanne.” Three weeks and four sessions later, Leonard nailed “So Long, Marianne,” a song he had recorded more than a dozen times with two producers and with two different titles. In total, since May 1967 Leonard had recorded twenty-five original compositions with John Hammond and John Simon. Ten of these songs made it onto Leonard's debut album. Four would be revisited on his second and third albums, and two would appear as bonus tracks on the
Songs of Leonard Cohen
reissue in 2003 (“Store Room” and “Blessed Is the Memory”).